I run across plenty of articles, either through friends pointing me to interesting things or via my feed reader and the interesting stuff people write outright. As everyone knows, there are far too many. But... here are a couple articles with metaphors that work for me. And they are related to the interests of this blog.
Chris Grams has Three tips for escaping the creativity peloton without giving up on collaboration which uses the bicycle racing image of the peloton as the connection to collaboration. The members of the peloton must work together, but at some point the winner has to jump out of the pack and cross the line first. It takes leadership, shared vision, and people who are working for the win. Chris argues the same has to happen in organizations.
The ever-prolific Robert Scoble has Coming soon: the disruptive molecular age of information in which he likes all the material out there on the web to "atoms" and the painful job of bringing those atoms together into "molecules" as something that may become more automated. As it stands now, it takes humans time and energy to do this: kind of like I've done in this brief article. Robert wants to see tools that help us be better at making the molecules we want to build. The logical connection here would be to the data-information-knowledge-wisdom hierarchy, but that's not really where Robert is going. He just wants to be able to supplement the human capability to blend and meld disparate ideas - to make it easier for people to make those molecules, rather than mucking about in the laboratory.